Book Description

The book describes the causes and effects of transient (water hammer) events in liquid-filled pipes, and describes how the powerful and stable Wave Plan Method (WPM) can be used to address transients during surge modeling. The authors compare and contrast WPM with the Method of Characteristics (MOC), which is the other widely-used surge analysis tool. While MOC can be useful for many situations, the larger and more complex a model becomes, the more the computational efficiency of WPM is necessary to avoid longer and longer analysis times. The authors also describe how WPM is more generalizable than MOC, which is a term that describes a suite of tools consisting of several variants that were developed to address different modeling situations. This book provides details on surge modeling in general and the use of WPM in particular. This includes pressure attenuation, determination of wave speeds in different pipe types and various liquid media, pump and turbine characteristics curves, and the effects of boundary conditions. The discussion of boundary conditions includes an extensive look at the effects of the air-water interface as it applies to bulk air intrusion into pipelines, and as it relates to the use of air/vacuum valves as surge protection. The authors discuss surge protection design for different real-world scenarios, and how to model of a full list of surge control devices, including a detailed discussion of check valves. Last, the book describes the assumptions and uncertainties encountered during data collection and model building, and examines the potential effect of these uncertainties. Where uncertainties cannot be mitigated, the authors discuss ways to increase the safety factor of surge protection designs.